Kindness and the Expanding Circle
Scope: The inward-facing ethic of the second half of Ryan Holiday’s Right Thing, Right Now: kindness as a standing posture toward everyone, the duty to see what we would prefer not to see, the Stoic circle of concern that keeps widening, and the heart as a muscle that can grow or harden. The structural and political side of the same book is in Power, Pragmatism and Virtuous Leverage; the basic definition of justice is in Justice as a Lived Virtue.
Kindness as a standing assignment
Holiday opens the theme with a quoted exhortation: “Goddamn it, Joe, you’ve got to be kind.” The list of recipients is deliberately wide: “Kind to strangers. Kind to people who you work with or work for you. Kind to someone who just made a mistake. Kind to both customers and vendors. Kind to someone you dislike. Kind to the future, to generations not yet born.”
The Stoic move is a change of perspective on ordinary friction:
“The Stoics said we should try to see every person we meet as an opportunity for kindness. This is a wonderful change in perspective. It transforms daily life, as challenging and noxious as it can be, into a series of chances, one after another, to be nice, to do something nice, to be considerate, to make a positive difference.”
Fatigue, busyness and having been treated badly do not release us: “Respond with kindness. Err on the side of compassion. Do the helpful thing.” The regret test is retrospective: “All we’ll wish is that we’d been a little nicer, a little less clever, and a lot more kind.” Kindness is also the one form of generosity that has no entry price (“nothing is stopping you from being generous in some form or some way”); see Generosity and Giving Without Credit.
Seeing: the duty of not looking away
Kindness requires information. Holiday’s diagnosis is that “it’s so easy to stay in our bubbles. To not see what we don’t want to see.” We do not do the math on the wages behind a product, on where raw materials originate, on where our money goes. His prescription: “We need to become vacuums for the lived experiences of other people—what makes it hard to be them, where they struggle, where they have been mistreated, where their daily lives are different than ours.” And the moral logic: “We cannot fix what we won’t face. We cannot stop what we refuse to acknowledge.”
The same logic extends to inaction. Marcus Aurelius is cited: “you can commit injustice by doing nothing also.” Holiday adds a self-interested corollary alongside the “First they came for the socialists” poem quoted in the book (“Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me”): “When you shrug at the suffering of someone else, you invite it, inevitably, on yourself and people you love down the line.” Indifference is “self-harm.”
The expanding circle
Holiday borrows Peter Singer’s phrase: “By ‘expanding the circle,’ as the philosopher Peter Singer terms it, we make the world better. We also make ourselves better.” The developmental argument: “We are born perfectly selfish … Yet we are given at birth the model of perfect selflessness: the unconditional love of a parent.” The task is to widen outward from there: “The bigger our circles get, the bigger our heart gets, the better the world gets.” The Stoic cosmopolitan frame (“The parliament of Man, the federation of the world”) and the idea that “The whole world is a temple, the Stoics said” push the circle to strangers, the defenseless, the voiceless and “other species.” The highest form is care for people who cannot reciprocate: “We have to care for those who cannot care for us—for those who do not care about us. This is our responsibility. This is our highest calling.”
Gandhi supplies the test case, with a standing faith in human nature: “Humanity is an ocean. If a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” Holiday’s gloss: “People are worse than we’d like. They are also better than we can possibly comprehend. That’s the power of grace.” See Gandhi and Nonviolent Resistance.
The heart as a muscle
The failure mode is hardening. Oscar Wilde, from prison, via Holiday: the terrible thing about injustice is not that it breaks one’s heart but “that it turns one’s heart to stone.” Gandhi’s biggest worry was “the hardness of heart of the educated.” Marcus: “what doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.” Holiday’s warning draws on Nietzsche: “those who fight monsters must see to it that they do not become one themselves.” His self-audit questions: “Is your heart growing or shrinking?” and “The heart is a muscle. You must make it strong. Strong, not hard and brittle. Strong enough to love everything and everyone in all situations. Strong enough to not break along with the world.”
Closing notes in the book compress the ethic to the personal scale: “you’re measured by how you treat the people closest to you,” and “Marcus Aurelius’s observation … that there are two types of plagues. One can take your life, he said, but the one to worry about is the one that can destroy your character.”
Kindness is the practice that keeps pragmatism honest
The book argues forcefully for power, allies and leverage. Kindness and the heart-as-muscle passages are the counterweight: the guard against becoming the thing one fights. Read the two articles together; “Pragmatism without virtue is dangerous and hollow” only works if the virtue half is trained daily. See Power, Pragmatism and Virtuous Leverage.
Possible tension with the dichotomy of control
Wanting to “become vacuums” for others’ suffering and to fix what we face stretches the Stoic rule of focusing on what we control. Holiday’s resolution (as in Justice as a Lived Virtue) is to anchor on conduct: what we notice, say and do is ours, the outcome is not. See Dichotomy of Control.